Robots and Humans

Robots and Humans

In last week's video, I asked which day you would like to get That Was The Week and whether you would prefer the video and content in a single post. The score is in:

So starting this week, I will wait to post the newsletter until the video is ready, and that will mostly be Saturday but sometimes Friday, depending on where in the world you are.

This week is a lot about AI. On Thursday, various executives visited the White House to discuss how to keep AI safe for humans. And Lina Khan wrote an op-ed in the New York Times entitled "We Must Regulate A.I. Here's How." A little like ChatGPT, she is hallucinating. When the Federal Trade Commission chair takes to the Times, you know it is because she has no actual path to execute her wishes.

She states that:

While the technology is moving swiftly, we already can see several risks. The expanding adoption of A.I. risks further locking in the market dominance of large incumbent technology firms.

There's the hallucination. OpenAI is a startup, barely a few years old and challenging Google, Facebook, Salesforce, and others. Hardly locking in the market dominance of incumbents. What is she smoking?

OpeanAI did announce a $300m raise this week. And Salesforce did announce SlackGPT, a large language model embedded in Slack. But the biggest news was Geoffrey Hinton, inventor of neural networks, leaving Google due to his concerns about the safety of AI. This exit was driven by OpenAi's success and Google's drive to catch up. That drive leaves the pre-LLM engineers fearing for their path to artificial general intelligence. A little like Gary Marcus and others, there is a turf war between data scientists on the right path to AGI. Like the Life of Brian movie, this is an inside-religion fight on details. The anti-LLM crowd is fighting for their careers and reputations and is throwing as much mud as possible at ChatGPT and its lookalikes.

Now in these turf wars, much is right on both sides. But as a non-combattant, I prefer to take what is good in both while encouraging the iteration towards good human outcomes.

OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockton has a video this week explaining and showing where ChatGPT is going next. It's wonderful, watch it. And there is a counter from the other side, so two videos of the week.

In the essays, much more on last week's theme of Shrinking. Wonderful essays by Carta, Charles Hudson, and Joanna Glaser from Crunchbase News.

Enjoy this week's collection in That Was The Week.

Essays of the Week